This is a view compounded of Zoroastrianism, Brahmanism, Gnosticism, Taoism, the macro-microcosmos of Hermes Trismegistus and other mystery religions, and not very much of orthodox Christianity. Christianity can be added if the pluriform microsparks of light are considered plural saviors or Christs comprising a single mystical corpus that is distributed widely in time and space in the dark realm but possessing only one psyche that is somehow also God, the yang or light god.
I have read the above cosmology over, and find no fault in it. In fact, I am amazed. It is in a sense acosmic, and certainly Gnostic, but the Taoist overlay is novel and pleasing; the Taoist overlay redeems it from the flaws of conventional dualist religions and the problems therein. Instead of stressing moral aspects (“good vs. bad”), it stresses epistemological (“real vs. irreal,” which I can understand). The lower realm sinks not because it is corrupt or evil or somehow has rebelled but because, as shown in hexagram 12, it is the nature of yin to sink, as it is the nature of yang to rise. The pre-Socratics (and Plato in “Timaeus”) were aware of this; v. the model of the winnowing fan and the concept of the vortex. Yang must assimilate yin to keep the totality intact; i.e. yang must renounce its natural tendency to rise and must descend. It cannot expect yin to rise, because yin is not wise; it is only noos that can understand that it must compensate against its own natural tendencies, and do what is unnatural to it. Yin is, so to speak, thick, unthinking, not noos [mind] but soma [body]; noos and soma (or psyche and soma) are the total universe organism. Descending into the yin realm is a sacrifice on yang’s part, which through its bright or wise nature it realizes it must make, but it pays a great cost in terms of suffering: loss of memory and identity, abilities, and faculties: It becomes pseudoyin, literally disguised in the yin realm as if it were actually yin, even to the point of forgetting (until reminded), that it is not. This is the agony we face here in this irreal and dense yin realm, we yang traces: This is not our home. We are voluntary exiles here, alienated and alone, violating our own natures for a salvific purpose — a necessary purpose. Yin would not understand this, and until anamnesis sets in for us, we in our distress do not understand the reason either. Eventually it will be revealed to us; meanwhile we ache with longing for our proper home, dimly remembered but deeply felt for. Thus we suppose we are being punished; it feels like punishment, and [we] make the error of assuming we have sinned. On the contrary; we have renounced joy now, to produce a greater joy later, for the good of all creation; we are the Godhead itself suffering the need to be what it is not, to ensure the ultimate stability of krasis (as Empedocles termed it): the unity of love.
Lest any Christian reject this, let him now read the Fourth Gospel in connection with this, and see for himself the similarities.
Lest any Taoist reject this, let him now see that hexagram 12
has turned to hexagram 11, Peace:
The upper trigram, in descending, has forced the lower trigram to rise. Disorder no longer reigns; heaven and earth are not pulling apart. There is harmony.
Moral: It is the ethical requirement placed on the yang traces by their own bright nature to abandon their natural tendency to rise, to escape what is heavy and dark and sinking; they must go in pursuit of the falling part of the cosmos, for the benefit of those and that which otherwise would be lost. This is the highest law: to violate one’s own nature for another’s good. And the most difficult — and painful — law to fulfill. Because of this need there is distress in the cosmos, distress for the innocent especially. My cosmology simply presents it as a fact. To escape it we would have to allow the cosmos to decompose. Could we do that? The tragedy is that by the very nature of the sacrifice we make we are occluded from knowing why. This is part of our sacrifices: our yang understanding. We must take on the dullness of yin to save the cosmos; we sacrifice the knowledge of why we sacrifice, and assume guilt — spurious guilt — in its place. This is asking a lot.
But consider who we really are. Or once were and will be again. Who else can do it? There is no one else. There is only yin, which does not know. The part of the organism that knows must help the part that doesn’t know, but this means abandoning its own knowing. It becomes what it helps, a dreadful irony, one that hurts. But it is only temporary, just for a little while. And then we go home for all eternity.
The Ultra Hidden (Cryptic) Doctrine:
The Secret Meaning of the Great System of
Theosophy of the World, Openly Revealed
for the First Time (March 2, 1980)
So to explain 2-3-74 I draw on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Orphism, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, Buddhism, esoteric Christianity, and the Cabala; my explanation sources are the highest — which is good and which makes sense. But put another way, starting at the other end, I have synthesized all these high sources and derived a single sensationally revolutionary occult doctrine out of them (which I was able to think up due to the addition of my 2-3-74 experience); the distillate expressed theoretically is, We are dead but don’t know it, reliving our former lives but on tape (programmed), in a simulated world controlled by Valis the master entity or reality generator (like Brahman), where we relive in a virtually closed cycle again and again until we manage to add enough new good karma to trigger off divine intervention, which wakes us up and causes us to simultaneously both remember and forget, so that we can begin our reascent back up to our real home. This, then, is purgatorio, the afterlife, and we are under constant scrutiny and judgment, but don’t know it, in a perfect simulation of the world we knew and remember — v. Ubik and Lem’s paradigm [see “The Android and the Human,” included herein]. We have for a long time been dying brains/souls slipping lower and lower through the realms, but the punishment of reliving this bottom-realm life is also an opportunity to add new good karma and break the vicious cycle of otherwise endless reliving of a portion of our former life. This, then, is the sophia summa of the six esoteric systems — seven if you count alchemy — of the entire world. Eight if you count hermeticism. We are dead, don’t know it, and mechanically relive our life in a fake world until we get it right. Ma’at [an Egyptian goddess who weighed the souls of the dead in the balance to determine their virtue] has judged us; we are punished, but we can change the balance. . . but we don’t know we are here to do this, let alone know where we are. We must change the “groove” for the better or just keep coming back, not remembering, not reascending.
Judaism enters, too, since the change in the “groovE” [sic] that introduces the right new good karma restores us to Eden, to our phylogenic original unfallen state. It may be a small act on our part that adds the good karma, a small decision, but this reminds me of the story told of Moses and the lamb that wanted to drink at the stream (Moses, upon finding that the lamb had laboriously made its way to the stream, said, “Had I known that thou wert thirsty I would have carried thee hence myself,” to which a voice from Heaven replied, “Then thou thyself art fit to be the shepherd of Israel”).
The reason why a small good act may tilt the scales is that you will be reenacting the good deeds that you acted out before, and some may be huge, but they in toto were not enough to tip Ma’at’s scale to provide you with adjudication of release to reascend. So the small act is new; it is an addition, but you are not aware that you are on tape, that this small, good act did not occur before; this time you have decided differently in a given situation: done the right thing this time. And a small act may reveal character even more than a vast one regarding which you have made a weighty and long-pondered decision. Spontaneity may be a crucial factor as an index of character.
In this synthesized occult system the maximum statement is the first: We are dead. Then: We have been made to relive a portion of our former, actual life as a punishment that is also an opportunity; hence this is not hell, because the possibility exists of performing a new act (in what is virtually a closed system) that will change the balance of the scale on which Ma’at weighs us. Also there is a complex picture of anamnesis and reascent, but this is well known from Plato and other sources.